Pick a format that fits your team, your time, and the conversation you actually need.
Three simple buckets that surface what to begin, end, and keep doing.
A reflective four-column retro for end-of-project lessons.
A four-quadrant retro for naming structural friction without pointing at a person.
A classic icebreaker that gets teams talking in five minutes.
The lowest-friction warm-up there is — pick a meaty seed word and the room tells you its mood.
Your name in the centre, branches for the parts of life you choose to share. Connection, not disclosure.
A pre-mortem that doesn't admit to being a pre-mortem. Run it before kickoff; come back at the halfway mark.
A thermometer for the room. If half the team voted Prisoner, you're running the wrong meeting.
A five-minute closer for a one-hour meeting. Not a sprint retro.
Norman Kerth's frame for a blameless retro. Read it the first time. Skip it the tenth.
Three dots, vote silently, the senior person votes last. Anything else is a popularity contest with a sticker budget.
Mad first or you wasted the meeting. Glad-first is hosting; Mad-first is working.
SSC with the edge filed off. Run it when 'Stop' feels confrontational and 'Less' feels survivable.
The four-column variant that splits Keep from Improve. Improve is where the work hides.
The retrospective for when you have more topics than time. The timer is the format.
The format you run when 'Mad' is too sharp for the room. Engineering teams should pick something else.
Sailboat is Speedboat with a wind column. Run Sailboat unless you specifically want anchors-only.
A technique inside a retro, not a retrospective on its own. Twenty minutes on one specific incident.
End-of-quarter, end-of-project. The mood line is the format. Don't run it on a sprint.
Two columns is too few. If you want a retrospective, use Start/Stop/Continue. If you want a journal, use this.
Five Whys gives you a chain. Fishbone gives you a map. Software bugs almost always need the map.
The cheapest diagnostic that exists. Treat the word as data, not warm-up.
A barometer with a half-life. Anonymous extends the runway; rotating the question keeps it sharp.
A longitudinal mood format dressed as a daily ritual. One day's dot is nothing; six weeks of dots is the format.
Specific or skip. 'Thanks for being awesome' is worse than silence.
A technique that lives inside Lean Coffee. Thumbs up extends; thumbs down moves on; sideways is the warning sign.
A confidence check before commitment, not a vote. The signal is the low end.
The press release dated six months out. Past tense or you're back to a wishlist.
Anonymous or you wasted the meeting. The senior person's fears anchor the room.
Works for design teams and offsites. Skip it for engineering on a Tuesday.
'What's X really good at?' is the format. 'What's X's strength?' is a 360 review.